History of Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigationJump to search
This article needs to be updated. Please update this article to
reflect recent events or newly available information. (August 2018)

The English edition of Wikipedia has grown to 5,954,655 articles, equivalent to over 2,500 print
volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Including all language editions, Wikipedia's has over
50 million articles as of 2019,[1] equivalent to over 19,000 print volumes.

Wikipedia's Main Page as it appeared on 20 December 2001

Wikipedia began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was
registered[2] by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its technological and conceptual
underpinnings predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was
made by Rick Gates in 1993,[3] and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online
encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open source)[4] was proposed by Richard Stallman in
December 2000.[5]
Crucially, Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization
should control editing. This characteristic greatly contrasted with contemporary digital
encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopædia Britannica, and
even Bomis's Nupedia, which was Wikipedia's direct predecessor. In 2001, the license
for Nupedia was changed to GFDL, and Wales and Sanger launched Wikipedia using the
concept and technology of a wiki pioneered in 1995 by Ward Cunningham.[6] Initially,
Wikipedia was intended to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia project edited
solely by experts, by providing additional draft articles and ideas for it. In practice,
 Wikipedia quickly overtook Nupedia, becoming a global project in multiple languages and
inspiring a wide range of other online reference projects.
According to Alexa Internet, as of September 2018, Wikipedia is the world's fifth-most-
popular website in terms of overall visitor traffic.[7] Wikipedia's worldwide monthly
readership is approximately 495 million.[8] Worldwide in September 2018, WMF Labs
tallied 15.5 billion page views for the month.[9] According to comScore, Wikipedia receives
over 117 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.[10]

Contents

 1Historical overview
o 1.1Background
o 1.2Formulation of the concept
o 1.3Founding of Wikipedia
o 1.4Divisions and internationalization
o 1.5Development of Wikipedia
o 1.6Organization
o 1.7Evolution of logo
 2Timeline
o 2.1First decade: 2000–2009
 2.1.12000
 2.1.22001
 2.1.32002
 2.1.42003
 2.1.52004
 2.1.62005
 2.1.72006
 2.1.82007
 2.1.92008
 2.1.102009
o 2.2Second decade: 2010–2019
 2.2.12010
 2.2.22011
 2.2.32012
 2.2.42013
 2.2.52014
 2.2.62015
 2.2.72016
 2.2.82017
 2.2.92018
 2.2.102019
 3History by subject area
o 3.1Hardware and software
o 3.2Look and feel
o 3.3Internal structures
o 3.4The Wikimedia Foundation and legal structures
o 3.5Projects and milestones
o 3.6Fundraising
o 3.7External impact
 3.7.1Effect of biographical articles
o 3.8Early roles of Wales and Sanger
o 3.9Controversies
 o 3.10Notable forks and derivatives
o 3.11Publication on other media
o 3.12Lawsuits
 4See also
 5References
 6External links
o 6.1Wikipedia records and archives
o 6.2Third party

Historical overview[edit]
Background[edit]
The concept of compiling the world's knowledge in a single location dates back to the
ancient Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, but the modern concept of a general-
purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia originated with Denis Diderot and the
18th-century French encyclopedists.[11] The idea of using automated machinery beyond
the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to Paul Otlet's 1934
book Traité de documentation; Otlet also founded the Mundaneum, an institution
dedicated to indexing the world's knowledge, in 1910. This concept of a machine-
assisted encyclopedia was further expanded in H. G. Wells' book of essays World
Brain (1938) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm-based Memex in his
essay "As We May Think" (1945).[12] Another milestone was Ted
Nelson's hypertext design Project Xanadu, which was begun in 1960.[12]
Advances in information technology in the late 20th century led to changes in the form of
encyclopedias. While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopædia Britannica, were
book-based, Microsoft's Encarta, published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM
and hyperlinked. The development of the World Wide Web led to many attempts to
develop internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal for an online encyclopedia
was Interpedia in 1993 by Rick Gates;[3] this project died before generating any
encyclopedic content. Free software proponent Richard Stallman described the
usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999.[5] His
published document "aims to lay out what the free encyclopedia needs to do, what sort of
freedoms it needs to give the public, and how we can get started on developing it." On
Wednesday 17 January 2001, two days after the founding of Wikipedia, the Free
Software Foundation's (FSF) GNUPedia project went online, competing
with Nupedia,[13] but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to
[Wikipedia]".[14]
Formulation of the concept[edit]
Wikipedia was initially conceived as a feeder project for the Wales-founded Nupedia, an
earlier project to produce a free online encyclopedia, volunteered by Bomis, a web-
advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael E. Davis.[15][16][17] Nupedia
was founded upon the use of highly qualified volunteer contributors and an elaborate
multi-step peer review process.[18] Despite its mailing list of interested editors, and the
presence of a full-time editor-in-chief, Larry Sanger, a graduate philosophy student hired
by Wales,[19] the writing of content for Nupedia was extremely slow, with only 12 articles
written during the first year.[17]
Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly.[16] The idea of
a wiki-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry M. Sanger and
Ben Kovitz.[20][21][22] Ben Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward
Cunningham's revolutionary wiki "the WikiWikiWeb". He explained to Sanger what wikis
were, at that time a difficult concept to understand, over a dinner on Tuesday 2 January
2001.[20][21][22][23] Wales first stated, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki
software",[24] though he later stated in December 2005 that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis
employee, introduced him to the concept.[25][26][27][28] Sanger thought a wiki would be a good
platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list that a wiki based
upon UseModWiki (then v. 0.90) be set up as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Under the
subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:
No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy
Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not... As to
Nupedia's use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE "open" and simple format for developing
content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to
either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented
practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk.
They're also a potentially great source for content. So there's little downside, as far as I
can determine.

Wales set one up and put it online on Wednesday 10 January 2001.[29]

Founding of Wikipedia[edit]
There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's editors and reviewers to the
idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style website. Sanger suggested giving the new
project its own name, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia was soon launched on its own
domain, wikipedia.com, on Monday 15 January 2001.
The bandwidth and server (located in San Diego) used for these initial projects were
donated by Bomis. Many former Bomis employees later contributed content to the
encyclopedia: notably Tim Shell, co-founder and later CEO of Bomis, and programmer
Jason Richey.
Wales stated in December 2008 that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the
text "Hello, World!", but this edit may have been to an old version of Wikipedia which
soon after was scrapped and replaced by a restart;[30] see [1]. The existence of the project
was formally announced and an appeal for volunteers to engage in content creation was
made to the Nupedia mailing list on 17 January 2001.[31]
The project received many new participants after being mentioned on
the Slashdot website in July 2001,[32] having already earned two minor mentions in March
2001.[33][34] It then received a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited
technology and culture website Kuro5hin on 25 July.[35] Between these relatively rapid
influxes of traffic, there had been a steady stream of traffic from other sources,
especially Google, which alone sent hundreds of new visitors to the site every day. Its
first major mainstream media coverage was in The New York Times on Thursday 20
September 2001.[36]
The project gained its 1,000th article around Monday 12 February 2001, and reached
10,000 articles around 7 September. In the first year of its existence, over 20,000
encyclopedia entries were created – a rate of over 1,500 articles per month. On Friday 30
August 2002, the article count reached 40,000.
Wikipedia's earliest edits were long believed lost, since the original UseModWiki software
deleted old data after about a month. On Tuesday 14 December 2010, developer Tim
Starling found backups on SourceForge containing every change made to Wikipedia from
its creation in January 2001 to 17 August 2001.[37] It showed the first edit as being to
HomePage on 15 January 2001, reading "This is the new WikiPedia!". That edit was
imported in 2019 and can be found here.
The first three edits that were known of before Tim Starling's discovery, are:

 To page Wikipedia:UuU at 20:08, 16 January 2001

 To page TransporT at 20:12, 16 January 2001
 To page User:ScottMoonen at 21:16, 16 January 2001
For more information see Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles and Wikipedia:First 100
pages.
Divisions and internationalization[edit]
Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally, with the creation of
new namespaces, each with a distinct set of usernames. The first subdomain created for
a non-English Wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.com (created on Friday 16 March 2001,
01:38 UTC),[38] followed after a few hours by Catalan.wikipedia.com (at 13:07
UTC).[39] The Japanese Wikipedia, started as nihongo.wikipedia.com, was created around
that period,[40][41] and initially used only Romanized Japanese. For about two months
Catalan was the one with the most articles in a non-English language,[42][43] although
statistics of that early period are imprecise.[44] The French Wikipedia was created on or
around 11 May 2001,[45] in a wave of new language versions that also
included Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish,
and Swedish.[46] These languages were soon joined by Arabic[47] and Hungarian.[48][49] In
September 2001, an announcement pledged commitment to the multilingual provision of
Wikipedia,[50] notifying users of an upcoming roll-out of Wikipedias for all major
languages, the establishment of core standards, and a push for the translation of core
pages for the new wikis. At the end of that year, when international statistics first began
to be logged, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbian versions were announced.[51]
In January 2002, 90% of all Wikipedia articles were in English. By January 2004, fewer
than 50% were English, and this internationalization has continued to increase as the
encyclopedia grows. As of 2014, about 85.5% of all Wikipedia articles are contained
within non-English Wikipedia versions.[52]
Development of Wikipedia[edit]

Screenshot of Wikipedia's main page on 28 September 2002

In March 2002, following the withdrawal of funding by Bomis during the dot-com bust,
Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia.[53] By 2002, Sanger and Wales differed in
their views on how best to manage open encyclopedias. Both still supported the open-
collaboration concept, but the two disagreed on how to handle disruptive editors, specific
roles for experts, and the best way to guide the project to success.
Wales went on to establish self-governance and bottom-up self-direction by editors on
Wikipedia. He made it clear that he would not be involved in the community's day-to-day
management, but would encourage it to learn to self-manage and find its own best
approaches. As of 2007, Wales mostly restricts his own role to occasional input on
serious matters, executive activity, advocacy of knowledge, and encouragement of
similar reference projects.
Sanger says he is an "inclusionist" and is open to almost anything.[54] He proposed that
experts still have a place in the Web 2.0 world. He returned briefly to academia, then
joined the Digital Universe Foundation. In 2006, Sanger founded Citizendium, an open
encyclopedia that used real names for contributors in an effort to reduce disruptive
editing, and hoped to facilitate "gentle expert guidance" to increase the accuracy of its
content. Decisions about article content were to be up to the community, but the site was
to include a statement about "family-friendly content".[55] He stated early on that he
intended to leave Citizendium in a few years, by which time the project and its
management would presumably be established.[56]
Organization[edit]
The Wikipedia project has grown rapidly in the course of its life, at several levels. Content
has grown organically through the addition of new articles, new wikis have been added in
English and non-English languages, and entire new projects replicating these growth
methods in other related areas (news, quotations, reference books and so on) have been
founded as well. Wikipedia itself has grown, with the creation of the Wikimedia
Foundation to act as an umbrella body and the growth of software and policies to
address the needs of the editorial community. These are documented below:
Evolution of logo[edit]

Founding – late 2001 (tentative)

Late 2001 – 12 October 2003

13 October 2003 – 13 May 2010

13 May 2010 – present

Timeline[edit]
Articles summarizing each year are held within the Wikipedia project namespace and are
linked to below. Additional resources for research are available within the Wikipedia
records and archives, and are listed at the end of this article.
First decade: 2000–2009[edit]
2000[edit]

Bomis staff in mid-2000.

In March 2000, the Nupedia project was started. Its intention was to publish articles
written by experts which would be licensed as free content. Nupedia was founded by
Jimmy Wales, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by the web-advertising
company Bomis.[57]
2001[edit]
In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on
articles prior to entering the peer-review process.[58] The name was suggested by Sanger
on 11 January 2001.[59] The wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org domain names were
registered on 12[60] and 13 January,[61] respectively, with wikipedia.org being brought
online on the same day.[62] The project formally opened on 15 January ("Wikipedia Day"),
with the first international Wikipedias – the French, German, Catalan, Swedish, and
Italian editions – being created between March and May. The "neutral point of view"
(NPOV) policy was officially formulated at this time, and Wikipedia's first slashdotter
wave arrived on 26 July.[32] The first media report about Wikipedia appeared in August
2001 in the newspaper Wales on Sunday.[63] The September 11 attacks spurred the
appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes
linking related articles.[64]
2002[edit]
2002 saw the end of funding for Wikipedia from Bomis and the departure of Larry
Sanger. The forking of the Spanish Wikipedia also took place with the establishment of
the Enciclopedia Libre. The first portable MediaWiki software went live on 25
January. Bots were introduced, Jimmy Wales confirmed that Wikipedia would never run
commercial advertising, and the first sister project (Wiktionary) and first formal Manual of
Style were launched. A separate board of directors to supervise the project was
proposed and initially discussed at Meta-Wikipedia.[citation needed] Close to 200 contributors
were editing Wikipedia daily.[65]
2003[edit]
The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003, while the next largest edition, the
German Wikipedia, passed 10,000. The Wikimedia Foundation was established, and
Wikipedia adopted its jigsaw world logo. Mathematical formulae using TeX were
reintroduced to the website. The first Wikipedian social meeting took place in Munich,
Germany, in October. The basic principles of Wikipedia's Arbitration system and
committee (known colloquially as "ArbCom") were developed, mostly by Florence
Devouard, Fred Bauder and other early Wikipedians.[citation needed]
Wikisource was created as a separate project on 24 November 2003, to host free textual
sources.
2004[edit]
The worldwide Wikipedia article pool continued to grow rapidly in 2004, doubling in size
in 12 months, from under 500,000 articles in late 2003 to over 1 million in over 100
languages by the end of 2004. The English Wikipedia accounted for just under half of
these articles. The website's server farms were moved
from California to Florida, Categories and CSS style configuration sheets were
introduced, and the first attempt to block Wikipedia occurred, with the website being
blocked in China for two weeks in June. The formal election of a board and Arbitration
Committee began. The first formal projects were proposed to deliberately balance
content and seek out systemic bias arising from Wikipedia's community structure.[citation
needed]

Bourgeois v. Peters,[66] (11th Cir. 2004), a court case decided by the United States Court
of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit was one of the earliest court opinions to cite and
quote Wikipedia.[67] It stated: "We also reject the notion that the Department of Homeland
Security's threat advisory level somehow justifies these searches. Although the threat
level was 'elevated' at the time of the protest, 'to date, the threat level has stood at yellow
(elevated) for the majority of its time in existence. It has been raised to orange (high) six
times.'"[66]
Wikimedia Commons was created on 7 September 2004 to host media files for Wikipedia
in all languages.
2005[edit]
In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet,
according to Hitwise, with the English Wikipedia alone exceeding 750,000 articles.
Wikipedia's first multilingual and subject portals were established in 2005. A formal
fundraiser held in the first quarter of the year raised almost US$100,000 for system
upgrades to handle growing demand. China again blocked Wikipedia in October 2005.
The first major Wikipedia scandal, the Seigenthaler incident, occurred in 2005, when a
well-known figure was found to have a vandalized biography which had gone unnoticed
for months. In the wake of this and other concerns,[68] the first policy and system changes
specifically designed to counter this form of abuse were established. These included a
new Checkuser privilege policy update to assist in sock puppetry investigations, a new
feature called semi-protection, a more strict policy on biographies of living people and the
tagging of such articles for stricter review. A restriction of new article creation to
registered users only was put in place in December 2005.[69]

Wikimania – the Wikimentary, documentary about Wikimania 2005, featuring Jimmy

Wales and Ward Cunningham

Wikimania 2005, the first Wikimania conference, was held from 4 to 8 August 2005 at
the Haus der Jugend in Frankfurt, Germany, attracting about 380 attendees.
2006[edit]
The English Wikipedia gained its one-millionth article, Jordanhill railway station, on 1
March 2006. The first approved Wikipedia article selection was made freely available to
download, and "Wikipedia" became registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia
Foundation. The congressional aides biography scandals – multiple incidents in which
congressional staffers and a campaign manager were caught trying to covertly alter
Wikipedia biographies – came to public attention, leading to the resignation of the
campaign manager. Nonetheless, Wikipedia was rated as one of the top five global
brands of 2006.[70]
Jimmy Wales indicated at Wikimania 2006 that Wikipedia had achieved sufficient volume
and called for an emphasis on quality, perhaps best expressed in the call for 100,000
feature-quality articles. A new privilege, "oversight", was created, allowing specific
versions of archived pages with unacceptable content to be marked as non-viewable.
Semi-protection against anonymous vandalism, introduced in 2005, proved more popular
than expected, with over 1,000 pages being semi-protected at any given time in 2006.
2007[edit]
Wikipedia continued to grow rapidly in 2007, possessing over 5 million registered editor
accounts by 13 August.[71] The 250 language editions of Wikipedia contained a combined
total of 7.5 million articles, totalling 1.74 billion words, by 13 August.[72] The English
Wikipedia gained articles at a steady rate of 1,700 a day,[73] with the wikipedia.org domain
name ranked the 10th-busiest in the world. Wikipedia continued to garner visibility in the
press – the Essjay controversy broke when a prominent member of Wikipedia was found
to have lied about his credentials. Citizendium, a competing online encyclopedia,
launched publicly. A new trend developed in Wikipedia, with the encyclopedia addressing
people whose notability stemmed from being a participant in a news story by adding a
redirect from their name to the larger story, rather than creating a distinct biographical
article.[74] On 9 September 2007, the English Wikipedia gained its two-millionth article, El
Hormiguero.[75] There was some controversy in late 2007 when the Volapük
Wikipedia jumped from 797 to over 112,000 articles, briefly becoming the 15th-largest
Wikipedia edition, due to automated stub generation by an enthusiast for
the Volapük constructed language.[76][77]
According to the MIT Technology Review, the number of regularly active editors on the
English-language Wikipedia peaked in 2007 at more than 51,000, and has since been
declining.[78]
2008[edit]
Various WikiProjects in many areas continued to expand and refine article contents
within their scope. In April 2008, the 10-millionth Wikipedia article was created, and by
the end of the year the English Wikipedia exceeded 2.5 million articles.
2009[edit]
On 25 June 2009 at 3:15 pm PDT (22:15 UTC), following pop icon Michael Jackson's
death, the website temporarily crashed.
The Wikimedia Foundation reported nearly a million visitors to Jackson's biography within
one hour, probably the most visitors in a one-hour period to any article in Wikipedia's
history. By late August 2009, the number of articles in all Wikipedia editions had
exceeded 14 million.[79] The three-millionth article on the English Wikipedia, Beate
Eriksen, was created on 17 August 2009 at 04:05 UTC.[80] On 27 December 2009,
the German Wikipedia exceeded one million articles, becoming the second edition after
the English Wikipedia to do so. A TIME article listed Wikipedia among 2009's best
websites.[81]
Wikipedia content became licensed under Creative Commons in 2009.